Paternalistic Work Regimes

Welfare Work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences

Work requirements in means-tested transfer programs have grown in importance in the U.S. and in some other countries. The theoretical literature which considers their possible optimality generally operates within a traditional welfarist framework where some function of the utility of the poor is maximized. Here we consider a case where society is paternalistic and instead has preferences over t...

Non-paternalistic altruism and welfare economics

Bergstrom showed that a necessary condition for a Pareto optimum with non-paternalistic altruism is classification as a selfish Pareto optimum. This paper shows that Bergstrom’s result does not generalize to the benefit-cost analysis of generic changes in public goods. There may exist good projects that will be rejected by a selfish-benefit cost test, a selfish test error. Selfish test error is...

Mismatch and the Paternalistic Justification for Selective College Admissions

Although some scholars report that all students are better served by attending more prestigious postsecondary institutions, others have argued that students are better off attending colleges where they are about average in terms of academic ability and suffer worse outcomes if they attend a school “out of their league” at which they are “overmatched.” The latter argument is most frequently depl...

Paternalistic Pension Policy: Psychological Evidence and Economic Theory

Left to their own devices, many people will not save enough for their old age. This hard truth about human behavior has led American government to make a long and expensive commitment to retirement security programs. Indeed, Congress has made retirement security the most expensive commitment on the American public policy agenda. Of the two main components of this policy, one, Social Security, i...

Obscenity Laws in a Paternalistic Country: The Korean Experience